Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a round green door with an orange brick surround, a red rose and green leaves, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Round green door and rose on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A round green door with swirling dark linework and an orange brick-effect frame sits at the centre, with a small handle on the right edge. A red rose with green leaves and a blue flower, along with a small sparkle, sit above and to the left. Bold black outlines and saturated colour with soft shading on the door give a neo-traditional finish against pale skin.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Door Rose Leaves Flower Sparkle Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the draught, because this is the part that frightens the novices. Brother Anselm kept the little round door in the wall of the lower cloister, the one painted the green of pond water, and he kept it locked with a key nobody had ever seen. Every winter the rose beside it dropped its leaves onto the brick frame, and every spring they grew back green, which is more than most of us manage.

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Now, the year the abbey ran short of candles, a boy called Tobiah came up from the valley with a sack of salt and a letter from his mother, and he asked Anselm what lay behind the door. Anselm told him the truth, which was that he didn't know. Tobiah went round the back of the chapel that night and found the handle warm, the way a kettle is warm when someone has only just taken it off the hob.

He went in. Inside was a corridor of curled iron swirls, just like the ones on the door, and at the end of it a room full of candles, hundreds of them, each one burning for somebody who had once knelt in the chapel and asked for nothing in particular. The boy lit one for his mother, and the flame bent towards him as if it knew his name.

When he came out, the sun was up over the orchard, the rose was in bloom, and the door was shut and cold. Brother Anselm was waiting on the step with the salt. "Well," he said, "you've been in, then. Now you'll have to carry the light for the rest of us." And that, my friends, is why the monks never lock the door from the outside.